Why Should You Listen to Me? #049

Why should you listen to me? What makes me any different or better than all the other talking head business gurus out there? Well, let me start by giving you a bunch of bullet points, highlights from my life. And if you find me interesting, then keep watching. If not, then go watch something else. My name is Chris Kerner and I like to do crazy things. First of all, I showed up at Buc EE's, a nationwide gas station that did not sell any of their products online. I bought one of everything. I launched this viral publicity stunt and I launched this online business for them. Today I own that business. And it's been four years and it's worth multi millions of dollars. I once showed up at John McAfee's house. I knocked on his door, yes, that crazy McAfee accused of murder. And we partnered and we built a business together worth millions of dollars. Back in 2018, I started a business in another business in the crypto industry that reached $10 million of revenue within three months. I started a business called LCD Cycle back in 2013 that reached $10 million in revenue in three years. I started buying RV parks in 2019 with some partners. We reached $10 million in valuation from our RV parks within 18 months. Sold it. About a year later, I'm buying RV parks again. Today we have about $80 million worth of RV parks. Me, my partners, and a bunch of investors. I own a small slice of that. I donated my kidney to a stranger. My wife donated her kidney to a stranger. I have four kids. We saw all 50 states in 60 days in an RV, all six of us, we call that 50 and 60. I spent my 20s, obese. I was 260 pounds. I lost everything. And then I ran 14 ultramarathons in two years and I won about four of them and set records in them as well. And I love business. I love starting businesses. I have a spreadsheet of every business I've ever started. It's about 72 and counting. Most of them either failed or were abandoned, and the rest were successful or sold. And. And so if you like business, keep watching and I'll tell you more details about some of these stories. If not, then I'll see you somewhere else. So, my Name's Chris Kerner, 37 years old. I live in the suburbs of Dallas, Fort Worth. I have a wife of 16 years. We got married and I was 21. She was 22 and four kids. When I was young, I lived in Logan, Utah. I lived across the street from a golf course and I was pretty broken. My parents didn't make much money. And these golf balls, I live across the street from the 18th hole. And these golf balls would fly into my front yard. And one day I had the idea, huh, I should sell these. I could make some money for a yearbook or for a field trip or for some candy. And so I did. I started gathering these golf balls. I'd go across the street, there was a ditch full of cattails and mud and water, and I would dig for golf balls. And then I got a little more brazen, and I, I jumped the chain link fence into the 18th hole at night with a flashlight, search for golf balls in the golf course. Then I'd go in the lakes, and I kept getting a little more bold, a little more brazen. And I would find as many golf balls as I could. I'd bring them home in like a plastic garbage bag, and I'd wash them clean in my red Rider wagon. And then I would walk down the busy road. And if you look up Park Avenue in Logan, Utah, today it is a busy road. I lived at, I think 1099 Park Avenue, and I would walk from my house to the clubhouse and try to sell them in the parking lot. Until one day the clubhouse manager came out and cussed me out. That was the first time I've been cussed out. So I never went back there. I don't like confrontation. So then I thought, huh, I need to put some signage out on my road because Park Avenue is a busy road. And so I got a big 4 by 8 piece of plywood and some spray paint, and I just wrote golf balls three slash for a dollar. And I leaned it up against my mailbox and I would wait all summer for these golfers to pull into my driveway and hand me a few bucks for nine or 10 golf balls. That was my first business. And it paid for my Schwinn bicycle and all the candy or peaches or plums I ever wanted, because I love eating fruit. That's always been my thing. And so I would get on my bike, I'd ride to the Macy's grocery store that is now a gym, I think. And I would buy candy and fruit, and then I would wait for the bus with my friends, and I would eat candy and fruit on the back of the bus. That was my first business. I was like 8 or 9 years old in Logan, Utah. At 11, we moved to Florida, Central Florida. My dad got a job at Kennedy Space center and that entrepreneurial gene kind of left. For a while. I got interested in girls and in wrestling. And in surfing and friends and hanging out. And my parents were still pretty broke, but I just didn't care about starting businesses for a while. And so at 15 years old, I got a job at a Mexican restaurant called El Eoncito. And it's a famous Mexican restaurant. It's still there. It's right on us one. And I was a busboy with my mom and my sister. All three of us worked there. I had three siblings, one brother and two sisters. And half of everyone in the family was working at this Mexican restaurant. And that's how I made my money, to go out and hang out with my friends. And so I wrestled in high school. Year round I'd go to the beach with my friends. I had a great childhood with great parents. And then at age 19, I served a mission for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. You've probably heard of us, we used to be known as the Mormons. And we go out in white shirt and ties at age 18 or 19 for 18 to 20, 24 months anywhere in the world. Maybe it's Lubbock, Texas, maybe it's Tasmania. I served in Hungary in the city of Budapest, the capital city. I was there for about half the time and then I was in outlying cities for the other half of the time. And that is where I met my current best friend and business partner, Nick Ulesky. He goes by co founders Nick on everywhere on all the socials. And I went first to the missionary training center in Provo, Utah and they taught me, they tried to teach me Hungarian for 12 weeks. You don't really learn a lot though, until you actually get to the country. So after 12 weeks of learning Hungarian with 10 others that were going to Hungary, I flew to the country and I met Nick. He was my first companion, also called my trainer. And we spent all summer 2006 knocking doors in Buda. So Budapest is split in half by the River Danube and the east side or the west side is called Buda and the east side is called Pest. And so we were in a more affluent part of Buddha, knocking doors and street contacting people all day every day. In my broken Hungarian Nick trying to teach me. And we just became fast friends. We were companions for three months or two transfers, basically the whole summer of 2006. And then we went our separate ways. About six months later he went home and I stayed. He went home at the end of his two years and I stayed my whole two years and had an amazing life changing experience. And really what that mission did for me was teach me how amazing America is. I never understood that. I never saw what was special about America because it's all that I knew. And then I went to Hungary, and I would meet these amazing, amazing people that had multiple college degrees that couldn't make more than $5 an hour. And they didn't know how to get out of that. They didn't have opportunity. There was too much regulation. They didn't know how to make money. And they were just kind of burdened by the sins of their father, so to speak. And living in this country that used to be run by communists, not too long ago, actually. And so I came home from Hungary, and I was just ready to take on the world. I didn't know what. But when I left, I didn't know what I wanted to do for college. But for some reason, on my mission, I thought, I want to do internationally. I want to do international business. That's what I want to do. And so while I was on my mission, I had a very serious girlfriend that I had actually baptized into our church. And we were close. We were going to get married for sure. But six months into my mission, she got married to my friend. Without ever telling me, she just stopped writing me altogether. And then my mom told me that her and he were hanging out a lot. And then I found out that they got married. So that was a huge blow, because big distraction on my mission. Just. It was very. It was tough, honestly. And luckily, I had a. My best friend. One of my best friends in high school. Her name was Jessie. She lived in Florida near me, and she had moved away to Alabama after a couple of years, and we didn't really stay in touch. But while I was on my mission, about halfway through, she came back home, and she sat next to my mom in church, and she said, how's Chris doing? My mom said, oh, he's on a mission in Hungary. You should write him. So she said, what's his address? So she got my address from my mom, and she started writing me physical letters. Believe it or not, this was 2007. And I started writing her back. And we kind of rekindled this crush. Friendship over letters in the summer of 2007. And we wrote each other faithfully for that second year of my mission. She sent me gifts and snacks. And I happened to come home from Hungary the same week that she had spring break. It was March of 2008. And she said, hey, how about I meet you at the airport? And it's like, I was very excited, but also, both of us were pretty nervous because it's a little awkward. I hadn't seen her in years. And is she totally different? Am I totally different? But we said, let's just go for it. So she drove down from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, she was a student at the University of Alabama, to Titusville, Florida. And then she went with my family to the Orlando airport, and there she was. And I have a picture of this moment that I'll upload here. Anyway, we hit it off quickly. We started dating. The next day, we went to a church dance. The day after that, we got engaged. A month later to the day on her birthday. And then about three and a half months after that, we got married. We got married in the Orlando Temple for our church. So in our church, we get married. We try to get sealed for time and all eternity in these holy temples. There's only a couple hundred of them around the world. And so we have been happily married for 16 years. And she is incredible. She's my everything. And I've got a lot of sins, I've got a lot of faults, but my marriage is just about perfect. And I can say that with full confidence. And that's because she just makes it easy. We see eye to eye on just about everything. It just makes life nice and easy. And we have trials. We've got kids that have had serious illnesses. We've moved all over the country several times. But my marriage is rock solid, and I'm grateful for her and for that. Anyway, so I came home from my mission. We got married very quickly. And when I came home from my mission, I had to report to the leadership in my local congregation. It's called a Stake High Council, and there are 12 of them. And I had to sit at this boardroom and basically present to them how my mission went. And it sounds a lot more intimidating than it is. They're actually very kind, and they just want to hear stories from me. And so I told stories from my mission. This was the Sunday after I came home in March of 2008. And then they said, what do you want to do with your life, Chris? What's next? And I said, I want to do international business, whatever that means. And afterwards, one of the gentlemen pulled me aside. His name is Nate Quigley. And I look up to him to this day. And he was the CEO of a company called Live tv. And I'd never met this man. I'd never heard of Live tv. And it was about an hour away from me in Melbourne, Florida, an hour south. And he said, chris, I'm looking for an intern in our finance department. Pays $10 an hour and it's just for the summer of 2008. And I said absolutely, sign me up. That sounds like business and I want to do business. And so Live TV was the first company that actually enabled live television on airplane. That was their claim to fame. And they were owned by JetBlue, they were subsidiary of JetBlue Airlines. And so I took that job, I made ten dollars an hour and I bought this fifteen hundred dollars Kawasaki motorcycle. And every single day I would ride it down I95 to my job. It was a 9 to 5. And I filed papers and I learned what AR accounts receivable and AP accounts payable was and I learned general business principles and I worked with great people and it was a very corporate setting. But it's all that I knew and I loved it and I loved the environment of business and my hours were flexible. They just wanted me to work 40 hours a week. They didn't care when. And so I would work 10 hours a day from Monday through Thursday. And then every Friday I would still get on my bike and drive to Melbourne, but I would go to Barnes and Noble around the corner instead of to live tv. And I was too broke to buy any business books. So I would just sit there all day and read books about, you know, real estate for dummies, startups for dummies, rich dad, poor dad, four hour work week. I would read all these books but never buy them. And then I would go to Taco Bell and get three bean burritos, no onion for lunch. And I would do that every Friday. And when I came home from my mission and I saw how incredible America was, I had this confidence that I had never had before because when I was in high school I was just like, I was just. I wasn't anything special. I was just a kid. I was doing dumb things. I had a three point something gpa. I was cheating on my tests and cheating on my quizzes and I took a couple AP classes that I barely scraped through. And I was just dumb and I wasn't motivated. I had no big plans or ambitions, college, who knows. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to go on a mission. That's it. That's all I knew. And I didn't even really want to be wealthy or rich or successful. I didn't have any plans. I didn't know what I wanted to do in college. But then when I came home from Hungary, I got rejected over 22,000 times in Hungary. And I added these up. I had a journal and we went door knocking and street contacting almost all day, almost every day. And I got rejected tens of thousands of times. And that plus the contrast of how amazing America is compared to most of the world, how much opportunity we have. I came home from America ready, or I came home from Hungary ready to take on the world with all the confidence you would ever imagine. I had it. And so when you take that, plus all this knowledge that I acquired from Barnes and Noble, never having bought a book, just reading it in a comfy chair, I was ready to just be the biggest businessman you have ever seen. And so that summer of 2008 was very transformative for me. And I maintained this long term or this long distance relationship with Jesse, my wife, because she was still a student at the University of Alabama, working and taking summer classes. And so we would, you know, every other week we would fly to each other, but we were trying to plan this wedding while I was working full time and learning about business. So then, August 8, 2008, I got married, we went on a quick honeymoon to the Virgin Islands, came home, put all of my stuff in a U Haul trailer, and we got her Toyota Corolla and we drove from Titusville, Florida to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And because I hadn't started college yet, I hadn't done anything but taken two community college classes before my mission and two AP classes. So I went to Tuscaloosa and I broke. And I started at Shelton State Community College. And I just wanted to save money. So why go to Alabama first? So I did. I went to a community college and got my associate's degree and I wanted to start businesses, but I needed money, I needed a job first. And so we lived at this little attic apartment right off campus. And this Thai restaurant had just opened called Surin of Thailand. And I thought, I'm gonna go be a server because they can make good money. So I just walked around the corner, it was like a two minute walk. And I walked in, I met a manager named Net N E T. And he's a great guy and I'm still friends with him today. And I applied for a job and he gave it to me. And then I said, hey, can my wife get a job, get a job? She has experience waiting tables. And he was basically like, huh, calm down, we don't like spouses working together. Maybe we'll see how it goes. She was waiting table at a steakhouse. But it wasn't going very well. They weren't very Busy. And so I started working at this Thai restaurant. And I don't like serving tables. I don't like waiting tables. I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people. I don't like pretending to become friends with someone that I'll never see again. And I don't like it when servers do that to me. But it was a job and it paid the bills and I worked really, really hard and I got the attention of net. He liked me. So I finally convinced him to bring my wife on board and she became a server, too. And he was very cautious. And I'll never forget the first night we served together. We served a party together. And she's a great hard worker and I'm a hard worker and we did a great job. And that the head of the party went up to NET and said, you know what, Chris and Jesse. And I don't know if he knew that we were married or not, but he's like, they are amazing servers. You have really great servers. And I just thought, man, we are going to get this all the time. Like, what are the chances? On our first night working together, someone would go out of their way to compliment us. This is going to happen all the time. And I think it's in the three years we worked together, it might have happened two or three more times, but it was just kind of a neat, tender mercy, so to speak, that they did it on that night. Because from then on, NET was sold that Jesse and I were good to work together. And so we both worked at that Thai restaurant. She would walk to class at the University of Alabama and I would drive to class at Shelton State. They had two different colleges. And then I eventually applied to be a student at the University of Alabama. And I got in and we kind of hit this turning point because we wanted to buy a house. So my timeline's a little off here, but seven months after we got married, we had been looking for a house. Now, this was 2008 into 2009. The housing market was a mess. Alabama was more immune than other states because it really never appreciated a lot. So there wasn't much to crash. But nonetheless, people weren't buying houses. And we wanted to buy a house. As two broke college students with student loans waiting tables at 213 an hour per tip plus tips. We found this lady named Ginger Pennington, and she was a loan officer. And I don't know how, I don't know how, but we made it work. We took out a loan. It was not an FHA loan. It was a conventional loan, three and a half percent down. We found a $90,000 house about seven minutes from campus. It was 60 years old, three bedroom, one bath. It had been listed for six months. And I just wanted to own real estate. That's all I wanted to do. It'd been listed for six months, and we called the realtor that was listing it for sale, which now I know you shouldn't do. They're representing both parties. And I said, hey, I want to buy this house. And she said, okay, well. And she learned that I was young and impressionable and dumb. And so she's like, well, you know what? The sellers just won't. They just, they won't take a price reduction. So I'm sorry. And I was like, that's okay, we'll buy it anyway. Idiot. It'd been on the market for six months. So I paid full price, $90,000, and we moved in. We broke our lease. We gave our lease to some friends. We were paying $500 a month for that attic apartment on campus, and our mortgage was $541 per month. So we thought, wow, that's an upgrade. We've got a carport, a driveway, we got neighbors, three bedrooms and a bath. We are living the high life. We had a great day, and this was the American dream. And so then in this time, President Obama was giving $8,000 tax credits to people that bought their first. First home, first time home buyer tax credit. And it was literally an $8,000 check that you got in the mail after buying. And that was a big reason that we bought, believe it or not. And so about seven, eight months later, after chasing down the government, we got an $8,000 check. And we both agreed, let's put this into a rental property. And so we found a rental property five minutes away in a rough part of town. It was a four bedroom, two bath. And we found it from one of the gentlemen that we waited tables on regularly. His name was Sam. He became a great friend. He sold us this house for about. It was like $53,000. And it was in a rough part of town once again. And we were now rental property owners. And we never had a problem renting it out. I think we rented it for 900 bucks a month, which is not a bad return for a $53,000 house. And we rented it to all walks of life. I remember one time we rented it to a Hispanic family that was in town for landscaping. And one day I went to check on them because they hadn't been Responding or paying their bills. And There were like 14 air mattresses in the house and candles everywhere because they had stopped paying their electric bill and they couldn't see. So there were a lot of people living in that house. And it was really a wake up call as to what being a landlord is like. So that was a great learning experience. It was also very tough. I remember my wife had to retile the bathroom once and she did. Not the best job, but better than I would have done just watching some YouTube videos. And so that was our second house after only being married for a year. And then my wife got pregnant with my, what is now my oldest son. And we didn't have any health insurance, we didn't have any money. I mean, we got pregnant on purpose. We wanted to get pregnant, but we didn't have a plan. And I was only 22 when she was pregnant and then I was 23 when he was born. And so I had to get a job. And I had heard that the county jail was hiring and so I went and applied for a job at the Tuscaloosa county jail. And talk about a miserable job. I got it. It was like $14 an hour, which in 2009 or 10 was amazing. And I had full benefits, health and all that time off. But at the same time, I had also applied for a full ride scholarship to be on the Alabama speech and forensics team. Now believe it or not, Alabama at the time had like a top 10 program for public speaking. They had a traveling public speaking team where you would go and compete against other state schools. And it was a really good team. And I had experience speaking in my church and on my mission. And so I'll never forget I had to go apply by giving a public speech to the current team and the advisor for the team and I gave it on investing in stocks in the stock market. And they I got in and it was a full ride, four year, all expenses paid to school. And I got this at the same time I got that job in the jail. And this was a big turning point in my life because I had to decide, do I chase this dream and get this scholarship that has a real monetary benefit and probably an amazing experience. I was going to be gone a lot, I was going to be traveling and competing or do I take this horrible job in the jail that will provide for my family and provide insurance for my child? I couldn't decide. So I'm being a man of faith, I prayed about it and I felt strongly that I needed to take the job in the jail. And so I never took that scholarship. I took the job in the jail, and I don't regret it. It was quite the learning experience working in the jail. Although it was absolutely terrible, it was the worst job I've ever had. It was the midnight shift, 7pm to 7am three to four days a week. And I was a guard. I would go guard the inmates and serve food and take fingerprints and mug shots, and it was absolutely terrible. And I had it for exactly nine months, just long enough to have insurance for when my son was born. But I'm glad I did. And I have some crazy stories from that. So we had my first son, and I started some businesses during this time. I started a business called textbook crook, and I had my rental house that was CK properties. And textbook crook was a marketplace for students to buy and sell textbooks to each other. And I had all kinds of little businesses at the time. But one day I was on campus, and I saw a sign that said, I'll fix your iPhone $60. And I didn't know what an iPhone was. And I had a dumb phone. It was a palm prio or something with a physical keyboard. It was bright red. And then a day after that, I was in a group doing group work at alabama, and one of the students said, I have a broken iPhone in my drawer if anyone wants it. And I said, I want it. You know, growing up broke, I'll always take free stuff. So he gave me this broken iPhone. It didn't even turn on. I went back to that flyer, and I said, hey, can you fix my iPhone? He said, come to my dorm room. So I did. And he had this little lcd screen, and I watched him fix it. He had a suction cup and a little. He had a suction cup and lcd screen and a screwdriver. That's it. And I just peppered him with questions, just like I do today with business owners. And I said, where'd you get the lcd screen? How long does it take? Where'd you learn how to do this? I got it from eBay. It's $15. And I'm like, well, I'm paying you 60. Wow. Okay. I got it from ebay, learned on YouTube. And I just had this light bulb moment where I can do this. I can do this business. So right around the same time, I read this article about this business called iPhone MD. And they were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They were LSU students, and they started a physical retail iPhone repair store. And there was a line out the door every day, and they were bragging to the media about it. And they were making $20,000 a month and they were planning their second location on Airport Road. And Apple tried to sue them because they used iPhone in their business name. So they had to change their name to my phone, Maryland. I was just like, man, if these guys can do it, I can do it. This will be my first real business. And so I started doing research and I looked up locations and I found a retail store right next to a subway and a McDonald's on 15th street in Tuscaloosa. 15th street and McFarland, which is like the busiest intersection in the county. Tuscaloosa County. And I signed a personal guarantee on a five year lease. 505 E. 15th St, Suite C. And it was $2,300 a month and I had no money to my name. And the suite had been vacant ever since the building was built for years. No one had taken it. And my commercial real estate agent was like, oh, you got to sign a five year lease. That's just what they are. You gotta have to sign a personal guarantee. Looking back, it's like, no. This place had been vacant for years. I didn't have to do anything. I could have done a six month lease with an option to terminate, but I didn't know any better. And so I started a business. And I'll never forget, I went to the Small business Development center and I wanted to get some advice on my business plan. And I talked to this boomer that owned a home inspection business. And I was so excited about this business. And I told him about the guys in Louisiana. I told them about the iPhone, how they're making millions of them and it's going to be the next big thing. And this guy just laughed me out of the room and he said, this is a stupid idea, this is dumb. He's like, that rent is too expensive. You need to open up in the ghetto where it's 500amonth instead of 2,300. And I was like, yeah, but they put the bars on the window. They put bars on the windows there. Like, who's going to go there to get their. Like, what sorority girl is going to go get her iPhone fixed in the ghetto? It's like, no, no, it's too risky. You got. So I left there so angry at this man, so fired up. And that taught me a lesson that I still use to this day. And that's if the haters know more about the industry or as much as you do, then listen to them. Take their advice to heart. If they don't then just let it be a chip on your shoulder and ignore them. Let it propel you forward. So I opened this business phone restore, and it was very slow. And my first customer was my entrepreneurship professor. And I was very grateful for him. Anthony Hood, Dr. Hood. I still appreciate him today. And he brought me his wife's iPhone. I paid. They paid 60 bucks. And that was my only sale that day. The next day I had no sales. And the first month was just slow. I was barely covering my bills. If so, I don't even remember. And then one day I went to the mayor's office. I just knocked on his door and said, walt Maddox, I said, walt, will you host my grand opening? Will you come to a grand opening? I'm a student and I really leaned on that hard. I want to have grand opening. And he did. And then I emailed the Tuscaloosa News and the Crimson White, which was the newspaper on campus. And I had this big grand opening. And from then on things were different. And I had a business and I could tell you all kinds of stories about that business, but I won't, due to time. But I ended up opening four locations over the next 18 months. One in Birmingham, two in Huntsville, Alabama, and then that one in Tuscaloosa. And we got taken out by a tornado. April 27, 2011, a swath of tornadoes came through the Southeast. Hundreds of people died. 50 of them were in Tuscaloosa. And it went right over our store. And we couldn't pay the bills. We put another 4 by 8 plywood sign with spray paint out just like I was a 9 year old in Logan, Utah. Again, said, you know, iPhones will fix your iPhone. And we made it work. It was right before the summer, so there were no students. It was a tough time. We just opened our second store, but somehow we made it work. And I ended up selling that business two months, two years later, and I started a company called LCD Cycle. And LCD Cycle was a. So phone restore got to six figures in revenue. It ended up getting. I sold 2/3 of it to some partners. I kept a third and ended up getting to seven figures in revenue. And then we sold it for about a million bucks. And that was nice. I got an exit in my twenties and the day after selling it, the first time I sold it, I started a company called LCD Cycle. And we bought and recycled iPhones, iPhone screens, and we would send them to China. And that's a whole story in and of itself. But LCD Cycle grew like gang investors. We did 2.1 million our first year, 4.8 our second, 9.6 our third. And then year four we kind of started to stagnate. We got to eight figures in revenue, but then we started to stagnate because the market got a lot more saturated and I wasn't paying as much attention to it as I should have been, honestly. But that ended up being a really good business. It paid me millions of dollars that helped build this house that I'm sitting in today, our dream house on a few acres in a great school district. And then we ended up selling it year seven or eight, that was LCD cycle. And then all along the way I've been starting all kinds of other businesses. I started a company called Mining Syndicate, that's still around today. It's been three and a half years and we did $10 million in sales our first three months. Profitably bootstrapped. So that's an eight figure business. I started a company called Texas Snacks and we're the unofficial, exclusive quote, exclusive seller of all Buc EE's products worldwide. And so Buc EE's is a popular gas station chain that originated in Texas. They have about 55 locations but they're multi billion dollar company and they don't sell online. And so we did that for them and I kind of growth hacked my way, I kind of forced my way in there to sell all their stuff online. And it's a good seven figure business today and my partner Kirk runs it and does a great job. I own another business or we started another business with my partner Kirk called Sendeats. They got to seven figures in revenue and then we ended up firing all of our customers. Sendeats was a third party logistics business for food brands, which is a fancy way of saying if you sold food on the Internet, we managed all the logistics for you. That was a really, really tough business. Not very, it was profitable, but not very profitable. Single digit margins, really, really tough to make work. So we ended up basically shutting it down, firing our customers and going all in on Texas snacks, the Buc EE's business, because that is a profitable business. It's hard, but we've cracked the nut. We figured it out. The hardest part is behind us and we grow about 30% year over year. So that's a business. I've started over 70 businesses and I have some other podcasts and YouTube videos documenting that. It's going to be like a four or five part series and I've done two or three of them, but I've started a lot of businesses, period. End of story. And I'm always hopping from business to business. And I believe in focus. Focus is important, but that's not what I've done. And so that's given me a unique advantage of having seen lots and lots of industries in lots of different lights. And I'm able to apply different learnings and marketing methods across these industries. When it comes to business, I like leadership. I don't really like management. I love marketing, I just love it. I love taking old school marketing methods with new school businesses or new school marketing methods on old school businesses. My dream, my retirement. The thing I do every day that I love the most is running marketing tests, validating business ideas. Testing, testing, testing. Maybe it's a Facebook ad, maybe it's flyers on cars, maybe it's ringless voicemail drops or cold calls or texts or cold emails or going door to door and asking questions. Market research, getting the first dollar in the door 0 to 1. Over and over and over and over and over. That is what I love. And so today, me and my partner Nick, the trainer for my mission, we own a company called Co Founders and co founders owns about six businesses. We have a software business, a tree trimming business, an RV park, mining syndicate, Texas Snacks, and then basically our content business. I always forget some of our businesses, some of those are profitable, some of them are not, some of them require a lot of hand holding, some of them do not. Furthermore, I have other partners in a private equity real estate fund called Blue Metric. We buy one to two large RV parks and campgrounds every month alongside investors. And so I help source those parks, I help market those parks and I help raise money for those parks. In 2019 I started buying mobile home and RV parks with two partners. We bought over mobile home and RV parked between Kansas, Texas and Georgia alongside investors and it went well until it didn't and it crashed. Landed very horribly because of a bad decision that my partner made that I will talk about in an entirely different video. Nonetheless, we were collecting 80 $90,000 a month in rent. We had eight figures worth of properties. We had a handful of employees and I took that experience and I leveraged it into what I am doing today as a co general partner in Blue Metric. We are buying one to two large RV campgrounds every month. We own 20 at this point and we have a couple thousand employees and we're closing in on $80 million of parks under our belt. So that's what I'm doing today alongside co founders as well. Furthermore, I have all this content. I have a podcast, a YouTube channel, and all this where I just talk about business. I love business. I love answering business questions. I love seeing young entrepreneurs start their first business. I love helping them personally. I have four kids. I've done some crazy things. I run. I've run 15 ultramarathons. I spent all of my 20s at 260 pounds. I was just fat. And then one day on our anniversary, our 10th anniversary in Hawaii, I looked in the mirror and I just said, what happened, Chris? Like, what are you doing? You're £260. My wife, bless her heart, never said a word to me about it, never complained, never told me I should watch what I eat. It was just myself. I just saw myself in the mirror or in pictures and said, you're done. You're done with this. And so, so I went on keto for five months, strict keto. I went from £260 to £200. That was five years ago, five and a half years ago. And I've been £200 ever since. Once I lost the weight, I started running like Forrest Gump. I'd never run before. I'd only wrestled in high school and I thought, I want my first race to be a marathon. And so three months after I started running, I ran a marathon. Then after that I learned what ultramarathons were. I learned about David Goggins. And a month after my first marathon, I ran an ultramarathon. And then I was hooked. I was addicted. You can tell I'm kind of all or nothing. I have an addictive personality. And so I started running ultras. First 34 miler, then a 50 miler, then 100 miler, then 140 miler. And I've broken some fastest known times on some trails. I'm not skinny. I'm £200 six, three. I'm built more like a tight end than anything, but I've got a good endurance gene and I can just keep going and I just keep eating food and keep running over and over and over. So I really love endurance events. I love doing 102, 300 mile bike rides. I love pushing my body to the limit and doing hard things. I have four wonderful children. They're all two years apart to the month, believe it or not. Three boys and a girl. My second oldest is a girl and at age three she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, which is a rare and terminal lung disease. It's a disease where the arteries in your lungs are too narrow, they're too muscular and so your heart, heart has to pump overtime 247 to get the blood through. And so her resting heart rate, her whole childhood would be in the 120s to 140s resting. And so her lips would frequently be purple. She couldn't really climb stairs without getting out of breath. She couldn't play sports, she couldn't run around. And it was really sad. She had to literally carry a metal oxygen tank for a while, like you see old people carry. Eventually she got an electronic oxygen concentrator and life was tough. We put her in studies in Denver. We had to fly to Denver every month and that didn't work. We, you know, we tried experimental drugs and nothing really worked. And at the end of the day, the doctor said, this isn't, she's got a year to live. We've got to, we've got to do a double lung transplant. And so with about two weeks notice, we, in the December of 2021, we had to move from Dallas to Houston. Houston has the best pediatric lung transplant facility in the country. So we did, we put this house that I'm sitting in on Airbnb. We couldn't rent it out on short notice and we needed someone to pay the mortgage. And so we moved to Houston. We rented a 1600 square foot house, which is about a quarter of this size of this house, in a neighborhood. And we lived there for six months and six weeks after we got there, we got the call at 10pm One night that said, we have lungs for your daughter. We think they look good. They're coming from Nebraska. And so we rushed to the hospital like we had planned. We had a go bag ready at any given time. We called the neighbors as we had planned. They came over, watched our other three boys, my wife and I and daughter, and we drove to the hospital, to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. And my daughter received lungs from a boy named Sam Walman, who was an eight year old boy. He was the same age as my third child. And Sam woke up one day having seizures and he never really woke up again. And his parents selflessly donated, did everything they could. They saved eight different lives with his donated organs, one of them my daughter's. And so that was a trying period, but the surgery went perfectly and the recovery has gone well. It's been two and a half years. The first year is the riskiest as far as rejection is concerned. We don't know what the future holds because lungs are the only transplantable organ that are constantly exposed to the outside air. And so she's at risk, unlike a kidney or A liver. She can't be around dust particles, she can't be in a barn, she can't go in caves, which is not like this is a big burden to us. But her lungs are very fragile. And so the best hope for us is for a second lung transplant in, you know, two to 20 years. Lungs last on average eight years, some go 15 to 20. And so we're hoping for a second lung transplant at some point in the future or some sort of medical advancement. But she's happy, she lives a very normal life. She takes a bunch of pills every day, but she no longer has that original disease that she was born with that had really no cause. It was idiopathic. We don't know what it came from, it wasn't genetic. So she traded the disease for someone else's lungs. And that's, it's a good trade off. We're happy for it. And so a year, what was it a year after? What would have been Sam. Sam was her donor. What would have been Sam's 9th birthday? On that same day, I donated my, my kidney to a stranger in honor of Sam to thank him for what he did. And then the following year, my wife this year donated her kidney to a stranger as well on the two year anniversary of her lung transplant. Or I can't remember if it was the anniversary of her lung transplant or of Sam's death because they were two days apart. So my wife and I have now donated both of our kidneys to strangers. And it was an amazing experience and we've suffered no adverse effects. There's no dietary restrictions, there's no pills we have to take. Basically, if 1 in every 10,000 healthy adult Americans. Healthy adult Americans, if 1 in 10,000 donated their kidney to a stranger, then no one would die on the kidney waiting list. Whereas today about 4,500 people die in the US per year waiting for a kidney unnecessarily. We have two and we need one. So I could talk about that all day, but I'm a very strong proponent of organ donation, living organ donation. So that's me. I've got a lot of crazy stories. I partnered with John Mack if he wants. The Bucky story is a whole video in and of itself. I have an extreme bias for action. I have business ideas all day, every day, which is cool, it's fine, it's interesting. But I also have this quirk where I can't not do something about it. Like maybe I just tweet about it, maybe I have to launch it that day, but so I have this extreme bias for action and all these business ideas and I just have to put them together. So this podcast, this YouTube channel is a way for me to talk about it. It, right, Talk about everything I'm doing, give you ideas, because I have more than I need. So hopefully you can take an idea, you can copy me something I'm already doing or something I'm talking about and you can start it. That's the whole purpose of this. I really want people that are stuck in dead end jobs or stuck in amazing jobs that they hate. I want them to start a business. Some people love their job and they want to be a nine to fiver. That's great. I want people to be happy. But there are a lot of people, millions of people out there that would prefer to own a business. They don't want to be under the thumb of their boss. And so I'm here to help encourage and motivate them. Not to sell them courses, not to talk about drop shipping, but to just talk about business experience, talk about how to market products and services in unique ways. That's why I create this content. I want you to quit your job if you want to quit your job. Because I don't want people to die with regret. I've done things that I regret, but what I don't regret is checking that box, right? Like I've started businesses that failed. I started businesses that I ended up abandoning. But at least I answered that question for myself. I started to use car business once. It was a concierge car buying service and it was terrible. I hated it, it was successful, but I quit it because I didn't enjoy it. But you know what? If I never started that, I'd still be wondering today what would have happened if I started Presto Cars. Would that have been a good business? I'd still be wondering. And I don't wonder anymore. So I don't want you to wonder. If you wonder what it would be like to own a business, I want you to at least check that box and check it out, see it for yourself. You might end up going back to your job and if so, great. But you might find that there's a whole world out there that you just love that is so much better than your job. And I want to do whatever I can to help you find that. So that's why I create content on the Internet. I'm driven by chips on my shoulders. I'm driven by people that have said things to me that piss me off. Frankly, that drives me. I have a lot of supporters, way more supporters than I have detractors, and I love my supporters. But the people that I think about when I'm trying to succeed are the ones that did not believe in me. So I'm grateful for them as well. Hopefully you learned something today. Hopefully you learned something about me that makes me a little different. Thank you for spending time out of your day to listen to me or watch me, and I will see you in the next episode.